February 22, 2011 09:32 PM UTC

Harm Reduction--Budgets Take a Village

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports:

The extra cuts to public schools that Gov. John Hickenlooper proposed last week will be half as large if the Senate’s top Democrat gets his way.

Senate President Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont, directed the Democratic chairmen of the Senate’s committees Monday to scour the departments they oversee for additional cuts that could offset Hickenlooper’s proposed $375 million whack at public schools, with a goal of trimming the cuts to around $200 million.

“Class sizes are already at unacceptable levels, and these additional cuts will exacerbate the situation,” Shaffer wrote in a letter to committee chairmen…

Republicans continued defending Hickenlooper’s plan Monday, with House Speaker Frank McNulty calling it “thoughtful and realistic.”

“If Senator Shaffer thinks he’s able to find that money, my question is why didn’t he do it two or three years ago,” said McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch.

We’re not sure what Speaker Frank McNulty means by that last remark, as the legislature has done everything it could in prior years to minimize cuts to education in the budgeting process. It was always certain that legislators would try to find small-scale offsets to the large cut to K-12 education proposed by Gov. John Hickenlooper, and Hickenlooper has made it clear he is open to alternatives. We’re not really surprised at the knee-jerk anger over Hickenlooper’s budget proposal, or the condemnation, even as it fails to recognize the origins of this vast shortfall–or the chance that the state will be shocked out of complacency by the threat of these cuts.

We note that few of Hickenlooper’s newfound detractors seem to remember his ability to anticipate objections and win voters to his causes–both in the Referendum C campaign in 2005, and the arguably more difficult Better Denver campaign in 2007, a set of nine revenue measures that all passed on the strength of Hickenlooper’s ability to show voters the need. In response to our post last week about Gov. Hickenlooper’s budget proposal, we got an amusing reply from a well-placed source to the effect of, “you seriously think Hickenlooper doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing?”

Obviously, we know enough of that history to stay tuned–and to not go off half-cocked.

It’s enough to note today that we’re at the beginning of a long budget process, and the end result is a collaborative effort. In the end, it could be that a compromise is reached with Hickenlooper more along Brandon Shaffer’s lines than McNulty’s, which could leave McNulty in a tough spot: with a bag of abandoned, unpopular cuts that nobody else will want to go near.

And either way, an electorate in Colorado more aware of the problem than they were before.